A Dying Mother’s Last Wish to Her Son

Betsy Mathews started smoking in 1944. In 2014, two days after Christmas, she died of lung cancer.

You smoke.

Oh, not a lot – seven, maybe eight
cigarettes a day.

Mom was like that.

If necessary, you can go two or three
hours between puffs. A movie. A dinner party. A Little League game.

Mom was like that.

You don’t smoke in the house, a nod to
your spouse who quit under surgeon’s orders after his heart attack.

Mom was like that.

You mostly light up outside – in the
garden, on the porch, in the rocking chair beside the bird feeder.

Mom was like that.

You’re much too polite to smoke in the
car, or around family members who don’t have the addiction. You tell people
that, yes, even one cigarette is bad, but at least you’re not like those
huddled wretches who fill their lungs inside smoking booths at airports and
rail stations.

Mom was like that.

Betsy Mathews started smoking in 1944,
her freshman year in college. She kept it up for 70 years until X-rays revealed
two large, fast-growing tumors in her lungs.

She quit in the fall of 2014, but the
doctor doubts it was discipline. More likely, he said, she inhaled one day and
it felt like the devil was breathing fire down her throat.

Death came two days after Christmas,
six weeks after her diagnosis.

Mom was an active, vibrant person who
ate the right foods and kept her weight down. Smoking-induced cancer stole her
too soon from the grandchildren and the little great-grandbaby she loved so
much.

Betsy Mathews didn’t smoke like a
fiend. She didn’t smoke a lot at all – seven, maybe eight cigarettes a day.

But they added up, and now Betsy’s
dead.

When Mom still had enough strength to
talk, I told her I’d like to write about cigarettes and lung cancer. Is there
anything you’d like to share? I wanted to know.

She whispered, “Tell them not to be
like me.”

Garret Mathews is a seasoned journalist who
wrote the metro column for the Evansville, Ind., Courier & Press. His email
address is garretmath@gmail.com.